Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 148

The difficulty with the proposition of compiling an Omnibus to present the lifetime work of an academic is that it risks bringing together ideas coming from different places and at different moments. Rarely can this be truer than for Chris Bayly, a historian whose 35 years of scholarship have ranged through various facets of Indian, global and imperial history. The newly republished Bayly Omnibus has a distinctly Indo-centric focus, bringing together three books which focus upon the evolution of Indian society and politics from the late-eighteenth century onwards. The third and most recent of these volumes, Origins of nationality in South Asia: patriotism and ethical government in the making of modern India (first published in 1998), is a selection of interrelated essays concerning the cultural backgrounds to Indian politics, emphasizing the determinant nature of indigenous ideas, institutions and multiple patriotisms over later doctrines of Indian nationalism. However, those with interests in the social and agrarian history of north India will inevitably find their attention drawn primarily to the first two volumes.

The first work included here, The local roots of Indian politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (first published 1975), examines the development of early political formations in a major north Indian city, and the backgrounds of those individuals who came to participate in them. The book documents how particular social elites, whether rural landlords, commercial entrepreneurs or urban professionals, became drawn into the machinations of local councils and public associations as a budding political class. By the author’s own admission, aspects of the book have dated, in particular the language of interest groups, political control, collaboration and ‘radical politics’ that characterized its period of writing. This said, as an illustration of the ensnarement of national political brands in local networks of power and patronage, and as a framework for understanding the emergence of ‘representative’ politics in local arenas, the work has rarely been bettered. It is helpfully re-published along with its companion article, ‘Rural conflict and the roots of Indian nationalism: Allahabad district since 1800’, which extends the analysis from the city itself to the networks of rural villages, gentry neighbourhoods and commercial townships in the countryside around it. In a valuable retort to the urban focus of many early ‘Cambridge school’ studies of Indian nationalism, the article demonstrates how modern political configurations and languages, far from being created in cities and then diffused outwards, frequently had distinct rural roots and manifestations which emerged c ontemporaneously with their urban ones.

Following up on many of these themes, but much more expansively, is the next volume republished here, Rulers, townsmen and bazaars: north Indian society in the age of British expansion, 1770–1870 (1984), an exhaustive and profoundly influential fusion of economic, political and social history set in the market towns and rural outposts of the Gangetic plains. Far from seeing the period in question as one of unmitigated political upheaval, the work’s most important legacy has been its depiction of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary transition to British control, with many existing social and political orders being sustained, appropriated or adjusted rather than comprehensively replaced. The work insinuates that the directions and strategies of British expansion were to some extent set by the indigenous forms of social organization and commerce which preceded their arrival. The work has therefore long been of note for its shifting of focus away from the sole agency of the British, towards so-called ‘intermediate groups’ who are examined with great lucidity, among them the rich cultivators, Hindu mercantile classes and Muslim service gentries who populated these small settlements. Painstakingly recreating their social histories, Bayly describes how these various communities gradually reshaped themselves during this period as the key figures of local government and the mainstay participants in the growth of colonial trade. This constitutes a major revision of the relationship between the colonial state and the societies of India’s rural heartland, showing how the latter did not simply fall into the colonial project as passive subjects but proffered the active agency of defining – in large part – the political and economic structures of British control. The book is, moreover, perhaps the best available study of the complex workings of north Indian agrarian society, documenting its interactions with the evolving class formations, commercial networks and public arenas which accompanied the transition to colonial rule, and, as such, the work’s importance is hard to overstate.

Each of these major republished volumes has in its own way achieved classic status, and each maintains its own longevity in the respective fields of historical debate which it has itself helped to trigger. The quality and influence of these works will ensure that their republication in this format will be widely welcomed by scholars and students of Indian history and historiography.